The Perils of
Internet Marketing

Is the Internet marketing and sales environment really so different from traditional selling environments? Let's look at history.

By William R. Stocking CMC

Electronic Attempts of the Past

Internet marketing and Internet sales are the lastest attempt to take retail sales into the electronic realm. This has been going on since the arrival of the first crystal set. Radio reined supreme for several decades before television took electronic huckstering to new heights. Remember the "Magic Fisherman" and the "Kitchen Magician"? Later, The Home Shopping Network and it's clones added the elements of a constantly changing catalog and buyer-seller interaction to the pitch-and-sell process.

Looking at it another way, this TV shop-at-home phenomenon added additional components to the process: it combined the advertising and sales elements into a shortened and unified parcel of time. Product presentation and orders for product occur simultaneously or immediately following the product pitch. It was a new way of doing business and a harbinger to what began happening as the century turned.

Print Advertising

Print advertising still has some advantages over electronic media. Hard copy stays around more than a few seconds allowing the gathering of information at a leisurely pace when and wherever it's convenient for the buyer. This style of buying better suits some people. It's a more sensual method; you can savor the product and flip the pages. (The extreme example of this is the "scratch and sniff" perfume ad.) And, needless to say, most of the world is comfortable with it.

Print advertising is particularly suited to complicated merchandise requiring study to make informed decisions. It is also most suitable for products that are fairly stable in configuration and price. This "persistent" aspect of print has some negative qualities: it takes longer to deliver and can "go stale" quickly. Print as a medium is a one way street: except for making paper airplanes out of it, there is no interaction.

Something Old, Something New

"Ok, now just how different is buying and selling on the Internet than on TV," you say. The sales process on the Internet combines most of the positive elements of print, radio and TV and adds a yet another element, personalization. Let's see how this works:

• Visual experience: Like television, buying from a website is primarily visual though audio is becoming a bigger part of the experience.
  
  
• Interaction: similar to television in the interaction between the seller and the buyer: You see it, you order it.
  
  
• User controlled presentation: Like print advertising, the buyer can navigate an online catalog at their own pace and in random order. This is a great advantage over television or radio presentations of product.
  
  
• Instant Update: Unlike printed catalogs, an online catalog can be instantly updated - no more stale information or pricing, but like printed matter, the online catalog has "persistence," the buyer can come back to it over and over until they're ready to make a decision.
  
  
• Tangible copy: As one browses an online catalog, they can always print out pages of major interest, (if the site is properly set-up, that is.)
  
  
• Personalization: This is THE major advantage of online selling and shopping. The Internet is turning the interactive elements of the sales process in a totally new direction; a direction hinted at by mail order catalog target marketing.

Snail-Mail vs E-Mail: It's Not The Same

Traditional marketers research buyer profiles then seek to mail additional prospects on the basis of matching demographic information on existing customers to lists of new prospects. The Internet equivalent, one would think, would be E-mailing prospects on this basis. NOT so, e-mail without permission is spamming, pure and simple. Spamming one's prospects and customers can do great harm to your brand!

We can help you do it right - Constant Contact's Email Services is a great place for a small business to start looking.

Internet marketing goes much further and in a different direction than traditional print advertising. The "target" of a personalized interactive website is a very specific person: YOU! Thus, we have gone through paradigms of "mass media" to "target marketing" and now we've advanced to a highly personalized shopping experience.

Personalization

Every time you visit a major website your every move through the site is followed and recorded. Of course, if you buy something that is noted as well, (I can imagine that somewhere in the bowels of the website a huge bell goes "bong, bong, bong.") This immediate buying process can trigger the presentation of additional items to go along with your purchase.

The next time you enter a personalization enabled site, what you see and what is offered will, in part, be based on your previous interaction with the site. Pretty clever, huh! This is not unlike a shopping trip to a favorite clothing boutique where the sales person has a record of what you have bought in the past, your sizes, etc.

The best example of this personalization process is illustrated by Amazon.com where it is refined on an almost weekly basis. They still might not be making much money at this point, but they are far ahead of everyone else in understanding and using personalization to build mind share and market share. I have confidence it will pay off big for Amazon and others like them.

The original version of this article was published in early 2000. Though the "DotCom" bubble busted in mid-2001, very little has changed with regards to how selling is done on the Internet since 2000. There is one exception: Unsolicited e-mail has become an evil ten times worse than it was just 48 months ago. Unfortunately, many traditional catalog marketers just don't get it - E-mail is NOT the equivalent of the printed snail-mail solicitation - The interactive website comes much closer and goes far beyond!

Your big question: Should you be marketing online? We'll discuss this and other aspects of using the Internet to better your business in future articles - The answer isn't that simple.